nick you can use baka. as in.. watashiha baka desu. I've found that the word Baka is used alot here.. and that Japanese more freely say something or someone is stupid and people tend to laugh about it. I guess it's all in how you use it.. mean tone or light/playful tone.

This is why I never write in romaji. Walk up to anyone and say "watashi ha ~" and I'm sure you'll get blank stares. It just looks funny because in romaji I expect watashi WA ~. If you don't have the patience to learn kana, I really doubt you'll have the patience to learn how to say much more than:

Honestly, there's almost no point in learning Japanese if you never learn kana/kanji. You can be as fluent as a native speaker, but what good will that do? You can't read anything if you visit/live in Japan, and outside of Japan, it can be hard to find someone to speak it to. You would have to write to them, but you can't.

I'm not trying to be critical, but rather trying to help. A (very bad) analogy could be like saying, “I’m going to be a doctor, but I’m going to skip medical school because it just takes up so much time!” Then when you’ve got a dying person at your hands what will you say? Learning them really won’t take up too much time, and is totally worth it in the end.

To expand a little on what everyone has said, even if you found a native speaker who will correspond with you in romaji, there's still the fact that you and he will most likely not use the same form of romaji - Hepburn or a variant is the most common romanization scheme in the English speaking world, but Japanese tend to use Kunrei or a variant. If you see "Konnitiha" as a greeting, are you going to understand it?

It's interesting that students in Japan are taught two different forms of romaji. One is the simplistic one that they are often taught in elementary school for typing (ta ti tu te to, etc), and then the second one is the Hepburn (or slight varient) that they are taught when they start english classes in junior Highschool.

So, when they write their names (or try to write katakana words in English) they write in the Hepburn style, but when they type, they revert back to the standard style, because it's easier to type.

To be honest I think he's just stopped posting because he didn't expect this response, but it's more less true that it'll be near impossible to find someone to practise Japanese with if you can't be bothered learning how they write.

I certainly wouldn't want to help teach someone Irish if they didn't want to the meaning of fadas and the romanised alphabet.

Jafar wrote:hi every body, please help me put correct idea of general form for japanese sentence, would someone explain this to me:

watashi wa anata ga doko ni sunde iru ka shitte iru

i want to know the subject, the object, verbs, adjectives, markers and ...thanks

watashi wa - "wa" is the topic marker, making "watashi" the topic of the sentence. Watashi is also the subject. The topic is usually, but not always the subject*

shitte iru - verb. present continuous** form of "to know". So so far we have "I know" (subject - verb).

anata ga doko ni sunde iru ka - all this is a subordinate clause that acts as the object of the main verb, shitteiru. This means it is telling us what I know. It has its own subject, verb, etc:

anata ga - "ga" is the subject marker, so "anata" is the subject of subordinate clause. For subordinate clauses you don't use the topic marker, "wa", so the subject is always marked by "ga".

doko ni - "ni" has many uses, but here it is being used like our preposition "at". "doko" is "where", so "doko ni" can be translated as "where at?"

sunde iru ka - verb of subordinate clause. "sumu" - "to live" in present continuous.*** "ka" after a verb is a question marker. In a subordinate clause it is also needed to "nominalize" the verb clause, so it can be used as an object in the main sentence. Thus, the subordinate clause means "where (do) you live". And the whole sentence means this:

"I know where you live."

*In certain constructions, like "watashi wa anata ga suki desu", the literal meaning is something like "as for me, you are likable/favorite", so although we just translate it as "I like you", the subject is actually "anata", and "watashi" is just the topic.

**This verb is a little strange because it's always in the present continuous form (literally "I am knowing") instead of "shiru" (I know). The negative, however, goes back to the simple present: "shiranai" = "I don't know"

***This is another verb that's generally found in present continuous in Japanese ("I am living"), rather than "I live" like we often say in English.

As always, if I have made a mistake or misrepresented something, please correct me!

Last edited by natemb on Sun 04.16.2006 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

nick-san wrote:hmph... a few weeks, i've been learning to speak it for months. I was originally looking into kanji but i realized it was mostly like learning chinese. But, as for the hiragana idea... i'd rather stick to romanji. PS: STILL NEED JAPANESE E-MAIL PENPAL!!! PLEASE PM ME FOR OFFERS. (again: SPEAKING not kana)B)

That's like saying I want to learn english, but I don't want to learn the alphabet. It can't be done. Well good luck finding a penpal, but here's some info: A good amount of Japanese people don't know romaji so you're going to have to learn kana sooner of later. It'll also improve your speaking skills dramatically B)

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."